


i have your dreams and your teeth marks

by inkspl0tches



Category: The X-Files
Genre: ? - Freeform, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, post-orison
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-09
Updated: 2019-04-09
Packaged: 2020-01-07 13:08:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,527
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18411281
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkspl0tches/pseuds/inkspl0tches
Summary: Also in the trunk of the car: the latest edition of JAMA, The Amityville Horror on VHS from Blockbuster, Moby Dick, a Jewel CD, a bag of clementines. Her still-closed Bible.post-orison. mulder takes scully on a witch hunt. there's nail polish involved.





	i have your dreams and your teeth marks

**Author's Note:**

> a response to the national lyrics as a prompt! part of my ongoing tumblr migration

_I have your good clothes in the car / So cut your hair so no one knows / I have your dreams and your teeth marks / And all my fingernails are painted_

\-- 

He is trying to balance equations outside his own bedroom door on Thursday morning.

For example: Because the square-faced deputy who had picked his way around the bloodstains on Scully’s carpet had said, ungently, Do not leave town, ma’am, this is an active investigation, the car is already running out front.

For another example: Because a different deputy and a red-faced Skinner had relieved Scully of her badge and gun (“Temporarily, Agent”), Mulder has already put his extra revolver in the trunk, along with Scully’s good blazer and square-toed boots.

Action/reaction. His partner is a scientist.

Scully opens the bedroom door quickly when he knocks. Wide, for effect, like she is and has simply always been unafraid.

“You don’t have to knock,” she says, a little red-faced in the morning light and his sweatshirt. “You live here. This is your room.”

He knocked because he knows she’s been locking the door at night while he brushes his teeth. Because when he’d crawled out of bed this morning, clammy from Scully’s night sweat and teeth marks, he knows she’d gotten up behind him to lock it again.

He shrugs, scoffs.“It’s polite. I wasn’t raised in a barn.”

Scully watches the floor and her bare feet and he takes off his baseball cap to pull it down over her sharp hair, smoothing his palm from the top of her head to her cheek.

“Get dressed, sleeping beauty. We’re gonna go somewhere. Get outta here for a bit. I’m out of food.” And her apartment is still a crime scene. So.

Scully narrows her eyes. “Mulder. I’m not supposed to leave town while the investigation is still pending. We can grocery shop.”

“You’re not leaving town.” He cuffs the brim of her Yankees hat and she tilts her face up to him. “Some cute baseball fan with exquisite taste in teams is.”

When she smiles, she doesn’t show her teeth. He thinks that is fine. Just fine. It is not about trying to pry her open, anymore. It’s about offering softer ways for her to stay closed. About knocking when she locks and re-locks the bedroom door.

–

Also in the trunk of the car: the latest edition of JAMA, _The Amityville Horror_ on VHS from Blockbuster, _Moby Dick_ , a Jewel CD, a bag of clementines. Her still-closed Bible.

–

They’d seen _The Blair Witch Project_ at the old Georgetown theater in July, the air conditioner blasting. Outside, the “feels like” index crept towards triple digits. Inside, Scully had watched intently, her eyes shining and both their hands greasy from popcorn. More than him, Scully is the horror movie buff, totally content to be manipulated into her adrenaline spikes. To be shaken within the strict confines of someone else’s story. Charmed (she really had said charmed, as they left the theater, not quite touching, as though a 12-year-old in the front of the theater hadn’t burst into tears while twigs snapped around the tent on screen) by the way the genre tries to realize the unreal.

By how belief has very little to do with whether or not you scream.

–

He had hoped it might be a little scarier. The ragged upward slope of the mountains, the spidery thinness of the trees. But the movie was set in November, and it is a soft April and the side of the mountain is flushed yellow with buttercups, still as a painting.

Scully leans back against the door of his car and doesn’t bother to shade her eyes against the sun with his Yankees cap hiding half her face. “Don’t get me wrong, Mulder, this is beautiful. But I never thought I’d lose my job over driving three hours to see a field of buttercups.”

“This is not about buttercups, Scully, it is about the Blair Witch.”

She tilts up her sharp little chin, slowly. “What?”

“Thought you might wanna do some of your own investigating, doc.” He rifles gently through the trunk and offers her an absurdly large flashlight. “Hm?”

“Mul-der.” Shaking her head, but smiling. “You know they filmed that in Montgomery County, right? Not actually in Burkittsville? We didn’t have to drive out here.”

But she takes the flashlight.

“I did not know that,” he says, turning to start up the path ahead of her. “Because I am not a nerd.”

–

The mountain is wide and empty and birds chatter at them from green trees. At a fork in the path, Mulder bends as if to tie his shoe and comes back up with a gasp. Scully!

She follows his finger to where he’s pointing at a little cairn pile of petals and twigs, tipi-d together like a tiny campfire. Scully raises her eyebrows, the corner of her mouth dents delicately into her cheek.

“That wasn’t there before.”

If he’s honest, it looks more like a memorial to a fairy or sprite or changeling and not to a witch. A monument to good magic.

Scully purses her lips, squats, and goes to blow it down and out like a birthday candle–to scatter the little yellow flowers and the green sticks. But when she gets close enough she swallows her breath.

–

And when it gets dark, the bottom of the mountain waits patiently as they make their way down, their flashlight beams catching and holding each other’s to make a perfect pool of light. The car is almost too easy to find.

They need gas and sustenance. Earlier, sitting out on a rock near the top of the trailhead, Scully had butchered a clementine for him, denting rather than piercing the skin with her too-short nails.

At the little convenience store on the highway, he buys snacks that don’t require dissecting. Scully buys two Cokes and a cheap little bottle of red nail polish that she fingers for a moment too long at the counter before pushing in front of the clerk. They picnic on the hood of the car under a tilted parking lot lamp.

He thinks maybe the baseball hat was a bad idea. Scully has been quiet all day, and he can’t see her eyes, and her mouth only at certain angles, really. He can see her hands all the time, but she’s kept them curled or in her pockets and so even that doesn’t help.

Finished with her Coke, Scully pulls her knees up to her chest and digs around in the plastic bag from the store. She pinches the little nail polish bottle with her fingertips and swings it towards him. “Wanna help me?”

He almost laughs–he can braid hair, but Samantha was too young for nail polish–but the bottle shakes a little in Scully’s hands, and he can remember bruised stickiness of the clementine in his palm. The smell of Pfaster’s freezer. The carpet in his mother’s house.

“Yeah.” He is very quiet. “Of course. I’ve never, uh, done this before, but of course.”

“It’s okay.” She sounds relieved. Her hand in his like he’s about to say it’s a pleasure to meet her. Her fingers curved gently over his palm are cold, and he presses his thumb once, twice over her knuckles. “You ever watch Bob Ross?”

“Yeah. Is this the same?”

“No, not really.”

The color is a thin, bright red on the little brush, gone just shy of translucent in the bad light. Blood comes obviously to mind and he swallows, holding Scully’s hand a little tighter as he passes it over her nail.

To distract herself, Scully talks. Or because she is distracted, she is able to talk. To think that his hands on hers is enough to draw her into or out of herself makes him a little dizzy.

“You know how, in horror movies, the last fifteen or twenty minutes are always one woman facing down the monster, or the killer, or–the witch? And they fight, or she fights, and she either wins or escapes. And sometimes she kills whatever is trying to kill her, but she always survives?”

A little of the polish runs on her ring finger, and he swipes at it with the edge of his thumb. “Like Jamie Lee Curtis. The final girl, yeah.”

He feels Scully nod and squeezes her fingers again. “Don’t move.”

“Sorry.”

Quiet except for the whir of the lights, and the night cries of the birds, pitched differently after the sun has gone down.

He finishes her left hand. The polish is smeared, a little runny. He glances up at her, a little bit pleased with himself, but she’s looking out over the parking lot. The shadow from his baseball cap paints all the way down her neck, leaking onto her shirt collar.

“And then it just ends,” she says. “Like that’s it. Like it’s over when he dies.” Her voice pulls and shreds a little. Dents and bruises.

“Oh, _Scully_.”

His final girl. His very, very last.

–

Later, and in better light, her fingernails will go the dark, healing red of a childhood scab.


End file.
